Chapter 9 #3
“No, I love journeys where death lurks around every corner. The Light only knows what those trees would’ve done if you hadn’t grabbed me, but I’m sure it would’ve been a grand time.
” I rolled my eyes skyward for a moment, doing my best to shove any imagined consequences well to the back of my mind.
“Maybe you could’ve screamed with me in a beautiful synchronized harmony?
We could make a traveling sideshow out of it. ”
His mouth spread in a much wider grin. “Fel Arron, I promise, I will die before I allow anything to happen to you—the world would be a much darker place without you in it.”
I gazed at him, still shivering with horror deep inside, and yet the sensation welling within my chest was anything but horrible. It wanted to burst out, a sensation almost like choking…but it was warm.
Warm and glowing. The cogs and gears in my chest spun once, almost experimentally, and there was no grinding sensation of despair.
“Come. Walk ahead of me,” he said, and put his hand out, palm up, talons glinting.
I didn’t hesitate. I put my hand in his, privately marveling at the warmth of it, how he took mine oh so gently when I knew he could crush my bones to dust with the slightest pressure.
Something gleamed in his pale eyes, an emotion I couldn’t quite read, but when he blinked it was gone, and he released my hand like it was made of hot coals.
“Stay a step ahead,” he said gruffly. “I have your back, Artificer.”
We walked in silence for almost an hour, and it was only when we found ourselves in a cathedral of stone, the entire building canted to the side, that I spoke again.
“I’m not a coward,” I muttered. Marrion moved ahead of us past the rows of long-petrified pews, and I followed in her footsteps, stepping over a mess of shattered rock and wood.
There were glass windows high overhead, looking out on raw rock.
It was like a temple had sunk beneath the earth, buried itself under solid stone, but at the head of the temple, under the round window, the place where a celestial icon would be was gone.
Only a base of polished obsidian remained; the statue of whatever god had once been worshipped here had vanished.
“I don’t believe you’re a coward.” Wroth glanced at me sidelong, his earlier amusement gone.
He was watchful now, ears constantly swiveling at the tiniest sounds my ears couldn’t hear.
“You’re a human, walking in a place hostile to your kind.
Your fear will help keep you alive. If you were a coward, you would’ve foisted this off on someone else and washed your hands of it. ”
I glanced at one of the lower windows as we climbed up the canted floor at a steep angle; my reflection was upside down, as though I walked on the ceiling, and facing away from me. I quickly looked away, focusing only on the strain in my legs.
“I think I feel it. That hatred you spoke of. It’s like a tickle in the back of my mind.
” I shook my head, quickly wiping my sleeve across my sweat-beaded forehead.
“It’s not strong yet, but…every step further we take, something in me knows we shouldn’t be here.
It’s like all that was evil about it soaked right into the stones. ”
“Indeed,” Wroth rumbled, his eyes fixed on the empty altar, seeing something far away.
“Sometimes it surprises me that we came through our exile without losing our minds. What made us different? Was it because we still hunted the living above? Was the taste of blood that had seen sunlight all we needed to keep ourselves intact? Was our collective memory, and determination to rise above again, enough to hold us together? Or was it because she made us, and whatever her intentions, she enabled us to live among the nightmares of her people without devolving?”
I frowned at him. “Who made you?”
Wroth gave me another unreadable look. “Mother Blood. Our goddess was Fae. We are but her creations, as the Fae Wargyr created the wargs.”
I blinked. “You are Fae…creations? Like the relics?”
“Humans aren’t supposed to know this yet,” Wroth informed me. “My brothers all agreed that this knowledge would be released very slowly into the human consciousness. But, fel Arron, if you’re going to risk your life down here, you might as well know the whole story. We are friends, after all.”
There was something almost threatening in his last words, and I heard the unspoken pact I’d entered into: these words were never to be repeated to another living soul.
“My sister-in-law is studying our ancient language. She suspects that your Lady of Light was Fae, as well.”
We passed through the cathedral into a long, narrow crevasse. I stumbled on a loose rock, reaching out to grip Wroth’s arm without thinking. When I righted myself, he was looking at my hand with an intensity I wasn’t sure it deserved.
“Well, that’s what happens when you drop life-changing theological anvils on someone’s head,” I said airily, pulling my hand away. “Dear me, I’ve been unbalanced.”
Wroth snorted, but I noticed he touched where I had grabbed him. “Indeed?”
“I jest. You can’t shock me with this, you know.” I smiled wryly when he looked back at me. “What is Artifice?”
“Machina.” He stared at me warily, eyes narrowed. “Like your golem.”
“Partly. Much of our clockwork is based on Nord machina, true. But Artifice is the study of such machina, combined with occultism. Which makes you wonder—the priests say true magic belonged to the Fae, or even to the gods themselves. So how the hell are we achieving it for ourselves? And once a person accepts that their clockwork is behaving in ways counterintuitive to the logical mind…well, it becomes much easier to accept outlandish claims such as a goddess being Fae.”
Wroth’s brows rose. “Oh? How oddly open-minded, for a human from my hold.”
I plucked my pocket watch from within my blouse.
“This is machina. It contains a quartz crystal, timing devices, gears. It does nothing more than tell me the time.” I tucked it back in and plucked out my dirt-loaded Pathfinder beetle.
“This is Artifice. It mostly contains the same components as my watch, and yet, thanks to one tiny chip of obsidian soaked in moonwater for a fortnight over a ley-line, it does things no machina should realistically be able to do.”
He studied the beetle, the pupils of his eyes narrow slits.
I put it back in my pocket, feeling frustrated with myself for being unclear. “Do you see? I am only human, and yet I create objects of occultism. My customers have no idea of what goes into my Artifice, and many would fail if they attempted to create it for themselves.”
“Still,” he said, his eyes on my pocket, “most humans would rage to be told such a thing.”
“Yes. There is a reason there are so few Master Artificers—you must be willing to see beyond the materials in front of you. Your mind must be so open it’s practically falling out of your head.
Technically, we’re…well, forbidden to speak of the details of the occultism to the uninitiated.
So don’t tell anyone, Lord Wroth. I’ll lose my license to practice. ”
“Your secrets are as safe with me as mine are with you,” he said, grinning again, and that sensation of everything inside me being in the right place, spinning smoothly, grew stronger.
“Once you’ve mastered the basic machining and engineering principles, they give you a final test.” I shook my head, remembering that day.
I could’ve graduated from the Collegium and gone on to design nothing more spectacular than pocketwatches and pistols, but that day…
I had picked up a black crystal, and felt something more inside it.
The prototype I designed that day had become the first draft of what would eventually become the beetle in my pocket.
“They give you the materials to design an occult machina. Not just anybody can do it—if an ungifted machinist put it together, they’d create a functional machina, but no more than that.
You have to be able to…I don’t know, feel the energies within the materials.
If you fail, they congratulate you on your machina, and never speak a word of the true intention of the test. If you pass, you’re admitted into the Artifice Mastery classes, and that’s when you learn just how much more there is to the world around us.
The side of the world people don’t like to think about.
And where does a Fae turned goddess belong, but in those hidden shadows? ”
“Oh, no doubt humans would pass many a sleepless night if they thought about it for longer than a second.” Wroth chuckled, nudging my arm, and I couldn’t tell if it was accidental or not. “No doubt this is why you fascinate me, fel Arron.”
Color mantled in my cheeks, and I opened my mouth to ask him if that was true—I fascinated him?—but Talos saved me from what would no doubt have become a terribly embarrassing moment.
His lights flickered, and he raised a hand. Marrion had stopped in the narrow passageway ahead of us, swaying in place, her head tilted back and eyes frosty white. We hurried forward, and Talos turned his light on her.
“I’m so afraid,” she was whispering, her voice a slurred stream of words. “Oh gods, oh Lady, it’s choking, the light, the heat, bubbling in my veins, insects under my skin, this is how I die its burning inside me drowning dying boiling alive—”
“Marrion,” Wroth said gently. “We’re here. There’s no one but us. You’re alive and well.”
He put his hand around her upraised palm, closing her fingers so the bloody Eye was obscured. She stood there shaking, breathing in heaving little gasps, and I slipped around them.
There was a dead thing on the floor of the crevasse.
A dead man.
I leaned in close, examining him intently. He lay stretched out on his stomach, one arm reaching toward us as though he’d been still desperately trying to crawl forward when he’d breathed his last.